Is that not the LLM guy? [LWN.net]

Is that not the LLM guy?

Posted May 11, 2026 20:30 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Is that not the LLM guy? by JoeBuck
Parent article: killswitch for short-term emergency vulnerability mitigation

It's likely that we'll see the protection applied to the _prompt_.

So if you ask the LLM to "fix this issue", then the result is not going to be copyrightable. But if you provide a detailed step-by-step spec for the fix, the result might be protected.

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Is that not the LLM guy?

Posted May 12, 2026 10:17 UTC (Tue) by stijn (subscriber, #570) [Link] (2 responses)

Prompts do not deterministically lead to the same result every time, so the detailed step-by-step spec is not a spec; I have doubts that the code resulted from the prompt is thus copyrightable. The rules in this new world are very unclear to me.

Is that not the LLM guy?

Posted May 12, 2026 19:25 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Sure. And in photography you'll never get two identical pictures. Yet you can still copyright specific arrangements of items in a photo.

This is going to be a case-by-case issue.

Is that not the LLM guy?

Posted May 12, 2026 21:27 UTC (Tue) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

The question is whether the LLM is the thing doing the work or if it's a tool being used by a human. Deterministic results aren't necessary to show human creativity was involved. Plenty of artists use techniques that incorporate some degree of randomness, like Jackson Pollack's splatter paintings or works including found objects. As long as the artist is making substantial creative choices, the work still qualifies for copyright. The same thing should be true of using an LLM as a programming tool. If the programmer is providing the ideas and the LLM is only handling implementation details, there would probably be enough creativity to qualify.